“How self-deceptive is it to treat an animal as a human?” Joachim Krueger, a social psychologist at Brown University and blogger for Psychology Today, ponders this question in a recent post, which was inspired by the passing of his 13-year-old Cocker Spaniel, Kirby. While the topic is not exactly earth shattering for those who follow the latest developments in ethology—Bark contributors and readers among them—it is always a pleasure to watch an academic embrace the idea of a complex dog mind. My favorite line from Krueger’s blog: “I think it is a mistake to believe that eye contact between humans is a finely-honed tool for mind-reading, whereas eye contact between human and dog is delusional—because presumably their is no mind behind those eyes.”